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Once the party had been pointed in the direction of their adventure hook, they went to the farmlands west of the fort, the last place anyone had seen a zombie cow. These monsters seemed to be originating from the direction of Sigyfel’s Tomb, but the Cleric, the only member who had been on that first adventure, knew that the tomb was small and not the source of the troubles. Outside the tomb, the fighter discovered some “not quite leather” that had torn off one of the zombie cows on a trail nearby. The party followed the gory trail of blood, fur and hoof prints through the scrublands and beyond into the wooded swamps.

The party heard a distant groaning “moo” in the distance. The goblin thief climbed a tree and was able to spot an undead bovine staggering awkwardly and bumping into trees. The party set upon it and quickly dispatched it, though they were a bit surprised by how much punishment it could take. They continued on in the direction it had come from until the trees gave way to a clearing with an obvious and large graveyard between them and the wall of surrounding the estate.

Rather than poking around in the graveyard, or even going around the wall to the south gate, the party -starting with the goblin thief- decided to scale the wall. This was an interesting choice, because it allowed me to show the party the entire layout of the estate (NW: barn, SW: undead chicken coop, NE: manor house, SE: undead garden) and gave the party a lot of options to try to launch a surprise attack. What they ended up doing resulted in a ridiculous cascading encounter which everyone agreed was pretty epic.

The party saw the 7 zombie elves (4 women, 1 man, 2 children) working in the garden just south of the manor house; instead of jumping into the fray, they leapt from the wall onto the roof of the manor house. Given that the roof was in somewhat bad shape, I kept making rolls to see if anyone fell through, but no one did. The party unsuccessfully tried to ambush the family of zombies, never quite sure whether they should stay on the roof or climb down and fight. The zombies seemed remarkably tough because I didn’t bother to tell the players that arrows did minimum damage and blunt did half. The cleric tried and successfully turned 3 of them, but the other 4 ran into the manor.

(By this point, everyone realized that they’d forgotten to do anything with the lead-entombed crown; it was determined that the mage was still carrying it in his knapsack.)

I gave the party a few moment to figure out what they wanted to do before a wraith rose up from the roof to attack the players who weren’t on the ground. The party managed to kill the wraith, largely thanks to the new fighter, but not before the mage and thief got energy drained. I haven’t quite settled on how I’m going to handle it, but I’m thinking of an XP deficit, rather than an out and out loss of level. I think my players are more scared not knowing. “The wraith strikes you. You feel sad.” “What happens?” “All of the joy in life has left you. You feel as though all you’ve been doing is meaningless. The treasures seek are worthless and those which you’ve found, you know you’ll never get to sell, and even if you do, what will it even matter?”

Meanwhile, the remaining zombie elf women are hacking the cleric up. The mage holds up his bleeding body with a floating disc while the fighter cuts through the zombies, but he doesn’t realize he’s offering the cleric up on a plate. Of course, all the commotion has alerted the Zombraire; half a dozen of his pet stirges crash through the thatched roofing as they soar into the sky. That’s when the mage makes one of the best uses of Sleep I’ve ever seen: “How high up are the Stirges?” “About 150 feet in the air or so.” “What’s the range on Sleep?” “Let me check… 240 feet.” “I cast sleep on the Stirges!” Everyone dives out of the way as stirges go splat around them, careening into the undead plants. A purple bolt is fired from a window in the tower, striking the goblin thief as the party finishes slaughtering the zombies (who had been dealing wicked damage in rolled plain sight).

“Well, you’re surrounded by death: dead elves, dead stirges, undead plants, a million flies and the stench is unbearable. What do you do?”

Go into the manor, of course!

The party makes it into the great hall just as the Zombraire has made his way down from the tower. He was going to blast the party with an illusionary fireball cast from his wand of illusions, but everyone made their saves. “He waves the wand at you… And seems incredibly surprised that nothing seems to have happened.” Having taken a hit, the Zombraire tried to make a run for it. The fighter caught him before he could get very far or cast more spells, cutting him down on the stairs of his tower. If he could’ve gotten his mirror image off, things might have been very different.

The party was now free to search the manor, found some swag, and burned some rot-grubs off the goblin thief. Though Richmond is under some suspicion and the party clearly isn’t going to give him the crown right away if at all, I was happy that the party discussed which items he might be interested in. We finally called it a night because I warned that any further exploration of the Estate would probably lead to an encounter almost as big as the last one.

So, thoughts on the Zombraire’s Estate module!

This is one of the mini modules from BFRPG’s free Adventure Anthology 1. Though it’s been teased at for some time, I didn’t ever know when I was going to get to finally run it. I hadn’t looked at this module in two months and still managed to run it by the seat of my pants and everyone had a great time. That alone is a sign of a quality supplement for a DM. I screwed up the placement of two rooms (transposing the bedroom with the kitchen) in the manor and as such lost a minor set-piece encounter that would’ve ended with the cleric turning the skeleton maids to dust the first round, but I’m okay with that. The wand of illusions is going to introduce some fun chaos to my game, but will be balanced by the fact that damn near everything has been undead.

So long as I can answer “why would the elves have an undead farm?” sufficiently with “because they’re terrible and evil”, ZE fits nicely into the Alfheim setting.

After Maze of Nuromen, this has probably been one of my favorite modules to run, even if I only get two sessions out of it. Depending on how you let things play out, there could be anywhere from as many as a dozen encounters to two or three monstrous battles. I don’t know how things will turn out with the barn, the zombie chickens, and the rats in the graveyard, but I think my players would concur that a fight against several zombies, stirges, a wraith and an elven zombie wizard was sufficiently awesome.

There’s been a bit of a shakeup in the Alfheim group as of late. The goblin has finals, and the fighter has a conflicting schedule with a new job, but we got a caster back and have a new fighter player. The abbey-monk was unable to make it to this session, so we had Cleric, new fighter, mage and goblin thief.

First we had to get a few things out of the way. Old fighter who may not be rejoining us woke up in the pre-dawn hours, mumbling incoherently about a ghostly blue stag with more points on its antlers than he’d ever seen, grabs his stuff and goes running after it. This is a workable in-game explanation for his absence because said fighter was exiled to Alfheim for poaching deer in the imperial reserve and was also kind of crazy. Goblin who is busy with finals has been completely out of sorts after having put on Caelden’s crown in the catacomb beneath Law’s End. After establishing this, I hurry everyone along back to town so the new member of the group can be brought in.

The party left Alfort in mediocre shape and returned to find that things had gotten worse. Everyone was dour, down in the dumps, and just seemed beat. As though the life had been drained out of them. Maybe too subtle? But there’s plenty of time for the gang to figure out what’s really up. The party ran into the crazy old bluesman at the inn, who seemingly pulled the Crown of Caelden out of thin air, laughed, and warned them that they’d better get it out of Alfheim, because the king was looking for it. This had the party pretty freaked. They are still unsure whether the bluesman is a real person or not or some sort of evil ghost apparition or illusion of the elves. But they do know that dudes who can be found playing their lute down at the crossroads in the middle of a ruined elven empire late at night are probably bad news.

After this brief encounter, the party spent an interminable amount of time trying to figure out what to do with the Crown. Part of this was my fault, because I’d built it up just enough that the players overestimated its significance to both the King and to the story. And that kind of encouraged me to run with it.

Their initial inclination to give it to Richmond was put aside quickly after the incident with the bluesman. Having it made them incredibly paranoid; you’d’ve thought it was the One Ring or something based on how they went about things. Their first idea was to try to make a replica of it (ostensibly to try to pass off to Richmond). There was a two-fold problem with this plan: Alfort didn’t have a goldsmith and the crown was a masterwork that had been intricately carved with Bosch-like scenes and had life-like screaming faces on its points. It would take at least 6 months for a master goldsmith to come up with even a passable facsimile.

The next option the party went for was to try to destroy the crown. The goblin thief failed to hit it with his mace; each time tried, it would stop a few inches short and he would hear “Hail, master” in his head (except for when he got a natural 20 later during the second attempt, I let him get a dent in, and his cursed mace said “Forgive me master”). The cleric managed to smack it with his silver mace. “You hit it. Your head is filled with a thousand screaming voices.” The cleric falls to the floor (his choice, not my ruling). I told them they managed to put a pretty solid dent in it. The mage takes it to the blacksmith and after some dubious negotiations convinces the smith to let him use the hammer and anvil to smash the thing. He takes a few whacks at it -being crazy- just to listen to the screams. He manages to hammer it into a pancake and brings it back to the inn, where the cleric is still lying on the floor (“am I still on the floor?” “I don’t know, do you want to still be on the floor? Everyone in the inn is looking at you guys like you’re crazy.”)

I decide to ratchet things up a notch while they’re trying to decide what to do with the ruined crown. I tell them that it’s starting to slowly resume its original shape like something out of a David Lynch movie. They beat and bash at it more, thoroughly ruining the table (which the cleric generously paid for). They ultimately decide that they needed to find some way to sink it in the sea (though there were some game-derailing ideas floated that would’ve turned things into a quest for a non-existent Mt. Doom), so made a mold to encase it in lead.

The cleric took some time to speak with the Querillite priests, who informed him that they’ve sent for warrior priests to come to the aid of the land. The players mistook the information about escape tunnels out of the city from below the chapel as a new dungeon, but I’ll let them figure that one out on their own. The fighter wanted to do a training montage type thing, so he went to the parade/training ground where he found the guards to be in an incredibly lax state. He was approached by a lieutenant who told him about the situation, with several guards having abandoned their posts, going awol and needing some sort of leadership to whip things back into shape. Also, he hooked him with the stories of the zombie cows that had been wandering into the nearby farmlands and said he could see if there might be some reward for helping take care of it. Finally, the goblin thief and mage asked about possible travel by boat either up the coast or to Estport, but none of the little fishing skiffs were particularly sea-worthy, nor did any of the fishers know when abouts the next real ship would be by.

Continued in part 2, when the party has a massive encounter with undead elves.

Later this week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the Fan Writers Category (expect some shilling), posting a partial review of the BFRPG module Zombraire’s Estate (Shadow Over Alfheim), and more Short Reviews.

I don’t know if I’ll really review Red Dragon Inn, but I will go ahead and say “I love this game, I want it and I want all of the decks and I wish it wouldn’t cost me close to $200 to get all of the decks.”

It’ll be a little while longer before I can continue my Bar-Lev series; I got my dad Ogre as an early birthday present, and we played it 4 times, leaving no time to set up another round of Bar-Lev. He said it was the coolest new board game he’d played in years. Considering his tastes in board games, that’s saying something. The only thing that’s a surprise to me was that he’d somehow missed it in the first place.

Well, we are only slowly easing back into things after our holiday break and brief interlude playing Pockets.

The players sold some of their non-coin loot, but held onto the Cat’s Eye Ruby, because “priceless” clued them in that either no one would have the money in town to buy it or maybe it was important, and the jeweled walking stick, because the goblin-ranger wanted a pimp cane. See? What’d I tell you about non-coin treasure’s awesome potential?

In a lot of ways, this session was dumping my players back into the sandbox and pointing out where the sand castles were. We were under some time constraints and the absence of one player influenced my decision to make this a bit of a “half-session”, but I think it worked out.

The goblin-ranger received a letter from a fellow goblin from the southeast tribe, informing him of the alliance between the southeast and northern tribes and the upcoming assault on the Old Island Fortress. 30 days, a force would try to dislodge the NW tribe and would welcome assistance from the young goblin noble and his companions. Goblin-ranger shared this with the goblin-thief and they are excited about the prospects of some goblins kicking ass, but decided to keep the note on the DL from the other players. Basically, this was a reminder that there was an unfinished nearby dungeon, but I’m going to be modifying the original module substantially to accommodate the shift up the timeline from when the party initially scoped the place out.

Meanwhile, the swordsman went walking around and happened upon a zombie cow that had strayed into the farm country northwest of the fort. This brief encounter reminded them that there is, indeed, still an elven plantation full of dead horrors somewhere in the wilderness to the west of Sigyfel’s Tomb.

The Cleric did some investigating in town, finding that things were pretty bad morale-wise. A lot of his following that he’d accumulated in the past have lost faith, and he even acquired a few hecklers who doubted the powers of the Saint. He met up with some refugees from Stull who report that the town is not doing well despite the players’ intervention (there just aren’t any jobs), and they plan to continue on to Portsdam to sail back to the empire. Most folks seem sure the colony is going to fail, but the cleric swears by his god that so long as he remains in Alfheim, it shall not fall.

The goblin thief caught me off guard a bit because he wanted to break into the Alfort keep at night. I managed to do a little bit of a castle climb on the fly, but between not having a map prepared and no real specifics given for the keep in the Morgansfort module it was rough going. With some difficulties, the goblin thief managed to scale the north wall of the fort and avoid patrols on the ramparts and climbed in a window. A couple locked doors (where the baron would’ve been, and a guest room), a little hall, and a sitting room were crammed into the 5x5ish keep’s upper floor. The goblin evaded a lazy guard, stole a few silver candle sticks, and no one in my gaming group has played “Thief” apparently (“From beyond the stairs, you hear a gruff voice saying ‘I’m going down to the bear pits tomorrow, you wanna come?’ Anybody? Anybody? Really?”).

Here, I’d like to shill for a moment (though no one is paying me to do so); if you ever need to come up with a mansion-dungeon on the fly, there’s no better tool than “Castles of Mad King Ludwig“; this game is perfect for this sort of thing. It’s a tile-laying mansion building game that is a lot of fun in its own right, but if you’re as lazy a DM as I am, you can grab a handful of tiles, put them together and have an instant mansion-dungeon map that you only have to guess a few relevant treasures and guards to populate it with.

In the end, the party decided that they would take another run at Law’s End to see if they could figure out why the goblin thief had had a vision of Nuromen or maybe why Taramedes’ house had burned down. I might have the elf who had to leave the game show up as a mini-villain. After our 5th player is back, I can retroactively adjudicate some in-town purchases so we aren’t in one of those situations where players are deciding whether or not they bought scrolls while the first encounter is happening.

This is going to be a briefer post than the others, largely because it does not involve number crunching. In fact, the purpose of this portion of the prep work is to reduce the amount of number crunching.

The battle and conflict as it’s statted out and scripted in the previous posts does not reflect the battle as a whole. While the 200+ Hit Dice of evil elven undead represents a formidable force more than capable of overwhelming the PCs and the fortress’s defenses, it doesn’t connote that “army” feel. It’s not big enough. Now, admittedly, this is going to be window-dressing, but it will certainly help the battle feel bigger.

Other factions –Imperial expeditionary force – I’m not sure what all will have happened between the time I am writing this and when the encounter will happen, but one possibility is that Portsdam is destroyed by an earthquake. Whether that happens or things have just been so bad in the colony that word has gotten back to the empire, let’s say that an expeditionary force has landed north of Alfort and is on its way. Maybe 2000 strong, this force, while small will certainly distract a chunk of the Elf King’s undead army, preventing it from bearing its full brunt against the fort. If the PCs haven’t cleared out the Zombraire’s estate module, this force will probably be ambushed from west and arrive significantly weakened and unprepared to stand against Caelden’s army.

Eastern Goblin Coalition – The Southeast and Northeast goblin tribes have formed a military alliance. They understand that a limited human presence in Alfheim is preferable to the land being awash with undead elves. Sometime between now and when the battle is run, the PCs will be presented with a chance to dislodge the Northwest goblin tribe from the Old Island Fortress (if the PCs don’t go along with it, the goblins will later take this on their own). The Old Island Fortress will be used as a staging ground for the eastern goblin tribes to lend their support against Caelden’s army.

Northwest Goblin tribe – I’ve retconned my setting a bit to eliminate Orcs as an indigenous people of Alfheim; while Orcs are there, they’re mostly imperial mercenaries (note to self, the imperial expeditionary force should be comprised largely of Orcs). That said, I’m rewriting Starisel’s dungeon to be inhabited by goblins (with Orc stats) instead of the orc tribe. These will be part of the same tribe who were trying to take over Malek (the Nameless Dungeon) until they were slaughtered by undead. If the PCs can reconcile with these goblins (successfully run Cave of the Unknown), there is a good chance that they might be willing to commit to fight against Caelden.

So we’ve got a Battle of Five Armies, here, a perfect climactic fight for the campaign.

To incentivise the players to gather these allies, I might even take away the last two waves via some sort of plot-flash.

The bulk of the monsters are going to be skeletons & zombies, low hit dice monsters who should probably be ignored, if possible, in favor of the bigger baddies coming through. So, let’s come up with some ground-rules for how each of these monsters operates:

Ghouls – move along the scripted path. Remove 1 HD of defense and ‘go away’ so long as there are at least 3 HD of defense present; otherwise, remove 1 HD of defense per round until no defense is present and continue along path.

Wights – move along the scripted path. Remove 1 HD of defense per round until no defense is present. When no defenders are present, continues along path.

Wraiths – move by flight through walls & buildings towards currently targeted zone. Remove 1 HD of defense per round until no defense is present. When no defenders are present, continues along path. Once, Nuromen may use “Sleep” to allow the elimination of 2d4 HD of defenders.

Mummies – move along the scripted path. Remove 1 HD of defense per round until no defense is present. When no defenders are present, continues along path.

Spectres – Considering their special ability of creating new spectres, I’m highly considering omitting these guys. We’ll see. moves by flight to towers, eliminating tower & rampart defenders. Remove 1 HD of defense per round until no defense is present. After reaching zone 6, will enter the chapel.

Vampire – moves along the scripted path. Remove 1 HD of defense per round, though continues along path without stopping.

Some of this wave might be turned; I expect this to be the first wave to do some damage in zone 1.

Wave 3
10 zombies
5 ghouls
1 wight

This is something of a wakeup call with the wight. If the heroes are fighting from the walls, it should be apparent that someone is going to have to go down and deal with it.

wave 4
5 zombies
5 ghouls
2 wights

Things being in earnest now. Clerics within the castle will likely have run out of turning, and the wight’s level drain could be a serious problem.

wave 5
10 skeletons
2 wights
Nuromen

Boss wave. While the skeletons just march onto reduce various zone HD, Nuromen will be casting spells and with the two wights who accompany him, he’ll be pretty tough, even with his limited HP.

Wave 6
10 skeletons
2 wraiths

Consider this a sequel to wave 5, but at least these wraiths aren’t casters.

Wave 6
5 skeletons
1 wraith
1 mummy

The mummy is going to slowly tank his way through the defenses.

Wave 7
1 wraith
2 mummies

Ditto.

Wave 8
10 skeletons
1 Mummy

Consider this wave a reprieve?

wave 9
5 skeletons
2 Spectres

If things aren’t already really bad, this may be the end of things. The heroes might seriously consider running at this point.

Wave 10
Vampire

The vampire more or less makes a Beeline to the bank, the apartments, the chapel, then the keep. He’s got important things he wants in those places.
Goals:
Ultimately, the castle is meant to fall. The main goal the heroes should have is staying alive or maybe stopping Nuromen (wave 5). Anything after that point ought to be gravy, though they should probably try to either escape through the Chapel Tunnels, the Keep Tunnels or any other possible means.

On the off chance that 8 waves are defeated before the chapel falls, I would consider this a decisive “win” for fort, if it weren’t for those pesky spectres. While Caelden might ‘retreat’, there would be a ton of dead that would need quick sanctification or things could easily be worse than before, in which case, the fort falls anyway. If the heroes manage to somehow defeat all 10 waves, Caelden likely retreats to lick his wounds. In this final case, he’ll probably be treated like any other vampire and sent to his lair (I might stick him in the Gibbering Tower) to be hunted down.
Up next, I’ll detail the tactical scenario leading up to the siege.

Important note: “Towers” may or may not hold their fire against skeletal or aetherial undead; regardless, their attacks have no effect. Special rules will be described later for ‘special’ undead (including leaders), who MUST be fought by the PCs.Phase 0:
The enemy army approaches; this gives PCs and the south towers opportunities to fire on enemy mobs.Phase 1:
Someone has answered the Call of Caelden, and, betraying the garrison, lowers the gate.

1 out of every 2 HD of monsters will enter the stable (area 3). After 8 HD have entered the stable, from east door, they will emerge from west door. All animals & npcs in the stable will have been eliminated, and the stable will begin to burn.

Survivors may escape via tunnels to somewhere Northwest of the fort along the coast.

Next time:
Figuring the monster hordes and possible Win conditions for the heroes. (Important to note, that if things get past phase 5, the battle should be, for most intents and purposes, lost, and hopefully the heroes will realize this. Then again, heroes love fighting to the bitter end.)